I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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Last week I said the idea of a Google driverless is nonsense and I repeat it – Google will not be a force in autos. In fact I’d go further and say I doubt this is a disruptive innovation. It is happening incrementally, now.

Within two years these major European manufacturers, particularly BMW and Mercedes who sell upmarket cars and have the margin to innovate, will have all the components of an automated car on the road, in production vehicles.

For example, to quote the World Future’s Society: “BMW plans to extend that idea in its upcoming i3 series of electric cars, whose traffic-jam feature will let the car accelerate, decelerate, and steer by itself at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour—as long as the driver leaves a hand on the wheel.”

And: “Mercedes is equipping its 2013 model S-Class cars with a system that can drive autonomously through city traffic at speeds up to 25 m.p.h.”

The S-Class will sport a stereo camera on the windshield to peer ahead in 3D, short- and long-range radar in front and rear, and short-range radar on the sides. Twelve ultrasonic sensors will detect objects very close to the car—during self-parking, for example. And added to external sensors, the S-Class will have internal sensors to monitor drivers.

And the other types of things that will happen, down the range, are more automated braking, more collision avoidance, more safety, more incremental change that began as as long ago as the early 2000s and whose R&D history spans back to the 1980s.

The German car makers are using different technology. Here’s a brief description of the technology.”The (Google) system combines information gathered from Google Street View with artificial intelligence software that combines input from video cameras inside the car, a LIDAR sensor on top of the vehicle, radar sensors on the front of the vehicle and a position sensor attached to one of the rear wheels that helps locate the car’s position on the map.”

But Richard points out that most car manufacturers are not dependent on complex databases and retrieval. They use sensor technology to recognize what is around them.

That provokes me to ask, might Google be setting itself up for the wrong project. Its system relies on rich data maps, which can also be created by its laser technology, so it looks like a great “organize the world’s information” project. But maybe not that necessary for cars. However, there is no doubting it could have a role in freight distribution for when you get used to the idea of lorries on the highways with no driver!

2. They already do great, safe software.

Automated safety technology is in the DNA of Tier 1 suppliers like Bosch who brought the world the first advanced braking systems. They have years of experience in creating safe software for cars, according to Richard Bishop, and they test the hell out of it. Before automated cars go down the car range to mid-market luxury car makers will have more years of experience and data. Bosch is offering its automated driver technology for 2014, also.

3. Google has a poor record outside search and ads

Google’s great moment was its first – monetizing content through search related ads. But its record of pulling off further disruptive change since then has been poor. Android is an exception but is Google the real beneficiary there? Samsung benefits. So does Amazon. As do HTC and ZTE.

Google’s extra-curricular projects appear more designed to boost its information businesses and in cars it might just want the opportunity to organize the world’s spatial information at a deeper level of granularity than it can right now. Can that goal produce a competitive enough product?

What I read into last week’s debate is that people are thirsty for some disruption and opportunity. Sorry, but this isn’t it.

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There is a huge gulf between the technology of the google driverless car and the current efforts of mercedes, audi, volvo and so on.

The car of the past is 1% technology and 99% mechanical. The car of the future is 50% tech, at least. Mercedes (and they are not alone) can’t even get their in-car system to seamlessly access the internet via bluetooth on an iphone! Adaptive radar cruise control and some collision and lane-following smarts offered by audi etc are one thing, cars that integrate with the best map database (controlled by google) and safely navigate through city streets? where someone legally blind can drive them? that is a whole other thing. The car companies have to show major systems integration skills that they have not hitherto shown to convince that they can beat google to market.

Google will license their tech. If the germans don’t come to that party, someone else will offer it. Who will break first? I bet Tesla would do it. Hyundai? would be an interesting marketplace if a Kia had a google self-drive option that was clearly superior to whatever cobbled together system mercedes puts in a 2020 s-class.

The crux of it is though why. Why automated? For safety reasons. And if Mercedes technology makes roads safer, that will be good enough. Add in the political dimension. Europeans and the Chinese do not like Google’s technological monopolies. They will resist.

There’s one other factor you don’t mention in your analysis, and it might be the most important from a business model standpoint. The driverless approach that Google is trying to build allows for car sharing, whereas the incremental, human-always-in-the-loop that car makers are pursuing does not.

An analysis done by Larry Burns and his colleagues at Columbia University’s Earth Institute concludes that there could be as much as a 10x cost-per-trip differential between the two models. 10x differentials provide a lot of economic motivation for disruptive change.

As I wrote in Part 3 of my series, Burns’ proposed business model provides a robust foundation for consideration of Big Venture Plays that might take the adoption process off the incremental track. At the least, it would be worthwhile to consider the scenario carefully, especially given the credibility of the study—Burns was previously head of R&D for GM and the study was funded in part by GM and Volvo.

As I’ve written before, this doesn’t mean that car makers are destined to lose. It does mean that their success will depend on more than an assumption that they’ll win because the technology will just crawl along. Sure, it would great for car makers to roll this technology out incrementally. That would allow for a stream of premium-priced, incremental features like parking assistance and accident avoidance—features that are well within the scope of carmakers’ own research and do not threaten existing business models.

The market, however, tends to throw wrenches into incumbents’ desires to stay the course. In that case, Google is in a pretty good spot. Thus, as I also wrote about in my 3rd article, about why change might come sooner than you think, it is also in Google’s interest to try to change the incremental course. Sure, it is high risk and might fail. Isn’t that true for all BIG innovations? But, it is hardly “nonsense.”

H Chunka. Fair point. I don’t think the car makers are crawling along through. Leaving that aside, they are also developing car sharing services but sure, anything can be disrupted. I just don’t see the evidence that Google can do it here like it did in print/ads wehre theri business model was a natural substitute.

No, I usually focus on the bigger picture. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Google’s goal is auto industry competition. It’s usually not a win or loose game to them (one exception being Google Plus). When Google dips its finger into an industry, that industry tends to get competitive out of fear. It’s not that Google is looking to find competition, it’s that the people at Google see something that they think they think they can do better and they start working on it. Industries that have become over-conglomerated and lazy suddenly find that they have to do something to stay relevant. Part of that includes giving a nudge to publications like Forbes to give a nudge to fellows like yourself to grab the public ear and remind them that there is nothing to worry about.